[c-nsp] ST not disabling port?

[Scott Altman]

Jee's comments are right on re: figuring out what is blocking / forwarding, etc.

If you are really depending on those links to go active should the
"normal" path fail, its much better to have them up with green lights,
vs, having the system bring them out of an admin down state, at that
point only to find out that the links may not work at all.

Spanning-tree roots and all that will let you tune some of the
pathways, determining which are forwarding; which are blocking. 
Several schools of thought exist around where you would want to block
in a 3 switch model, depending on which switches are your
"distribution" or aggregation and which are host edge.  Perhaps not
the socio-political discussion you were looking to get in to though...
 :)

- Scott